“It was thirty years ago today that Sergeant Jobs taught the band to play,” Stephen Fry writes for The New Adventures of Stephen Fry. “Sergeant Jobs together with Privates Smith, Atkinson, Kawasaki, Crow, Espinosa and the rest of the Apple Macintosh team, not to mention all those back at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and the crew at Stanford who had built the first computer mouse, and back before them, of course, all the geniuses in a line back from Steve Wozniak and Gordon Moore to the original pioneers like Von Neumann and the great Alan Turing.”
“I like to claim that I bought the second Macintosh computer ever sold in Europe in that January, 30 years ago. My friend and hero Douglas Adams was in the queue ahead of me,” Fry writes. “For all I know someone somewhere had bought one ten minutes earlier, but these were the first two that the only shop selling them in London had in stock on the 24th January 1984, so I’m sticking to my story.”
“The Macintosh… was a revolution. Yes, it took the best bits of many people’s other ideas, just as the Model T Ford and Spitfire did, but it was the first home consumer or small office computer with a graphical user interface or GUI and that had to be the way forward, unless you were a cretin,” Fry writes. “I wish no ill on any other manufacturer of computers or digital devices. But I think it would be an odd, ornery and wrong-headed poltroon who didn’t agree that it is worth recognising the 30th anniversary of a machine that changed everything in our lives.”
Loads more – very highly recommended as usual – in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mark Briton” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Apple plotting first Super Bowl spot since 1999, ad legend Lee Clow hints – January 27, 2014
Apple’s Macintosh: ‘Doomed’ for 30 years and counting – January 24, 2014
Steven Levy: The Macintosh is 30, and I was there for its birth – January 24, 2014
20 ways Apple’s revolutionary, astonishing Mac changed everything – January 24, 2014
Apple invites website visitors to celebrate 30 years of Macintosh – January 24, 2014
Happy 30th Birthday, Apple Macintosh! – January 24, 2014
I’m informing Apple Corps of this article’s unauthorized use of their intellectual property.
Steohen Fry is a bright individual.
He got it 30 years ago and still gets it.
To bad the BBC is infected with MS shills.
Too right there but never used to be like that they were still the forefront of the Macs support then then Rory Cellan Jones & crew took control at the Tech side and despite smacks on the wrist from the Trust they still keep up their FUD and Microsoft brown nosing.
Uhhhh!!!
Douglas Adams + Steve Jobs = I can’t believe your not there anymore.
Sob.
The day Douglas Adams died, I shed 42 (not 96) tears.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/42-the-answer-to-life-the-universe-and-everything-2205734.html
There is inexact detail in this article: what Jobs liked when he has met Jonathan Ive in December of 1996 was not, of course, iMac, it was translucent eMate 300 and other designs and prototyes Jonathad did for Apple.
The main shape of iMac, however, was Job’s idea; this is why he was lead designed, as patent lists it. The same was with iMac G3 and Powerbook Titanium. Jonathan Ive was lead designer on other products: Powerbook G3, PowerMac G3, and so on.
Interesting story if “true”. I doubt it though.
“CERN (Centre Européeen pour la Recherche Nucléaire the now famous large hardon collider that found the Higgs Boson or a tiny thing pretending to be it) …” (excerpt from Fry’s blog)
A hardon collider? Freudian error on Stephen’s part?